[WBEL-users] wbel and dell

[Kirby Bohling]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 12:56:59PM -0500, King, John (Greg) (LMIT-HOU) wrote:
> Well i never was able to get WBEL to work on the dell GX240 when trying to
> install anything other than Desktop. The install will stop near the end,
> lock up the system and the keyboard scroll and caps locks keys start
> blinking.

John,

	I'm assuming all three lights are blinking (scroll lock, numkey
and caps lock).  If they blink at regular intervals, that means
you've hit a kernel panic.  That leads to some questions:

1.  Have you memory tested the machine? (first thing I do on a
kernel panic, it's more right then it is wrong, and normally only
takes an hour or two to run).

2.  Have you tried using the both the WBEL3 and WBEL 3 Respin 1?
They have different kernels, and they might be different enough to
get your thru the install without the panic.

3.  Have run the install in "expert" mode?  Do you know where it is
that it's locking up?  Have you checked the log file to see the list
of packages that actually got installed after it kernel panics?
(You'll need a rescue disk to do that)

4.  If you do the desktop install, and then start installing all the
rest of the packages does it lock up in a similar fashion on some
other packages?

It's very hard to diagnose the problem remotely.  This list is
relatively small, so it might be that very few people have your
hardware.  My guess is that your hardware has problems.  I've done
unattended installs on probably 10-20 completely different hardware
setups with WBEL without issues.  I'd start pulling out absolutely
every piece of hardware you don't need (including unneeded RAM).
I'd pull the network card, the sound card.  Disconnect the floppy
drive, any extra harddrives.

If it's a laptop, it could be a power managment thing, you can try
disabling that, turning off DMA, APCI (I think that's the one, maybe
it's ACPI).

A friend of mine came across a problem with RH9.0 where he had too
much RAM installed to do a network based install, and there was a
corruption in the kernel due to it on some blade servers he was
installing.  Removing the extra RAM solved the problem.

Oh that could be your problem.  How large a swap space did you
make?  I know for a fact, on a machine with only 128MB of RAM you
can lock up a machine during the OpenOffice package getting
installed.  If you don't have a lot of RAM (512MB), you might need
to make a large swap partitions (if only for the install).  I've run
into that on several occasions.  I've found that 512MB between swap
and RAM is enough.

I'd start stripping down the machine to it's absolute bare bones.
If you have the hardware, I'd try a network based install isntead of
a CD based one, and disconnect the CD drive.  Something is going
wrong in the kernel, and that's your problem if you get blinky
lights.  The odd part, is that you should get a kernel panic message
that says where it locked up.  That wouldn't help me, but you could
search for it else where in Google.  Did you try both a GUI and a
text based install?  Does that change where it locks up?  Have you
tried sitting on console 2/3/4 in expert mode.  Those have more
information on them about the install and where it's at.

	Thanks,
		Kirby


> 
> I re-burned the cd even though they all tested fine. This time I burned them
> at 8x instead of  the higher speed I used before. WBEL does work on other
> PCs but as the systems I am working on in this case are all gx240s I guess I
> am out of luck as no one on this list has apparently seen this either. The
> GX240 loads FC1 and FC2 nicely though. 
> 
> Greg King
> 
> 
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